


swimming home

by blacksandunderstars



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 05:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17954240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacksandunderstars/pseuds/blacksandunderstars
Summary: . . . in which the wreck of an old life is left behind . . .





	swimming home

The strangest things occur to her, in moments after the most terrible things have happened. Never the thoughts she expects, not railing against the injustice, not anger at the madness and indifference of the universe

Those things are there, how could they not be? But her memories steal her away in unexpected directions.

She remembers her childhood self playing pirates with her best friend, or eating a particular meal, or walking on a beach scattered with the corpses of whales. And whether it’s a true memory or something imagined, they always get corrupted. They flicker and dance with snow, like the televisions when she was a child, or the meal is something she’s never eaten despite being able to remember the flavor of it so clearly.

And the whales watch her, their eyes huge and alive in their rotting, stinking corpses. They sing, in impossibly intricate melodies, about their pain. They’re telling her their stories. Life and culture, love and loss, miles deep, where there’s no sunlight and no warmth but their own bodies.

She isn’t sure what this is supposed to mean. Maybe nothing. 

So she rides in the passenger seat of Chloe’s battered old truck, and considers the life of the leviathans. It’s better than looking out the windows, better than seeing the corpses beneath sheets and towels, scattered around the wreckage of the town she grew up in. 

And on their meandering journey they drive by one of the actual whale corpses, blown into town by the tornado, perched on the broken heap of a building. She stares at its broken body and imagines that it, too, is watching her leave, singing a melancholy song about being young and swimming in the wake of sea turtles, seeing schools of fish swarming and turning in the endless deep, sweeping over reefs filled with fish and coral of every possible color and shape, feeling the tug of tide and time, being carried by the currents, always heading back home.

Later, that’s what she remembers most clearly about that moment. They were pushed and spun by currents they couldn’t see, thrown against rocks until they were as broken as the wreckage of the town. They were both weighed down by the horror and pain and regret. But they were still swimming, on their way home.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a bunch of fragments about this game, most of it a lot more angst-ridden and darker and angrier than this. I kind of had to, because it basically destroyed me. I still can't listen to certain songs without tearing up.
> 
> But it's been a rough few years, and the next few don't look like they're going to be any better; and I suppose I wanted to dredge up something a bit more hopeful, however short it might be.


End file.
